Just a glimpse into my mania

I just had the most delicious nap. Yawn. I’ve been looking forward to this nap ever since I woke up this morning… cranky, tired, grumpy. I’m a real dreamer – I have dreams all the time, I remember them well, and today’s nap was the second daytime nap in a row where my dream was about knitting! And this one is so out there, I have to share.

I’m riding in the car with some people who aren’t familiar to me. We are going to a RedSox game, and the stadium is on our left. The road approaching the stadium is narrow and suspended up in the air, like the subways in some parts of New York City and Chicago. It is a huge stadium, and we must circle it to get to the parking lot. The female driver is going fast, way too fast. I close my eyes and feel as though I’m riding a rollercoaster.

We reach the parking lot; we park. We are walking down a humongous set of metal stairs, just down, down, down… stairs, landing, stairs, landing… we overkill and end up going down to the basement. We backtrack and enter the stadium.

I’m with my classmates, and one of them, J., has my ticket. Each ticket gets the ticket holder 2 beers, either Sam Adams on tap or I.P.A. (I think) in a bottle. I’m not much of a beer drinker, so instead I receive a voucher good for 2 coffees. J. and I walk away and I say, “this is silly, why didn’t I get beers for you guys?” He says, “I dunno. Why didn’t you?” We have time to spare, so we walk over to one of the areas where beer is sold. J. and I check our wallets for a dollar bill to give as a tip the bartender. I have a wrinkled one, soggy from the humidity, and I hand it to the bartender along with my voucher. I ask for the Sam Adams, I expect it to come in a bottle. Shit, it’s on tap, and eventually the bartender hands me the pint glasses, which I must balance above my head before lowering them down. A little beer spills and gets on my white t-shirt. My classmate B. joins us and comments, “looks like you spilled a little over here.” Yep, I spilled it a little.

I hand over the beer to J. and wander away for a little while; the game doesn’t start for some time. I walk around the huge stadium and end up in a little garden of sorts. I run into a beautiful middle-aged woman. She is all over the place, walking around, checking papers, looking in her bag. I am knitting, and we start a conversation. She says, “What are you making? It’s beautiful!” I say, “thank you, it’s a little sweater I designed.” She says, “Can I see?” I hand it to her and I immediately realize that it’s not a handknit! It’s a stretchy machine-knit, like from a store, where a pattern is printed on the fabric after it’s knit. But I have just a few inches of it, and it’s sitting on a honkin’ US 5 or 6 needle. There’s a ball of yarn attached, but I can’t see it. I want to see the ball of yarn, to see if it’s white like the fabric’s background, or perhaps it’s pre-printed to create that beautiful design, like self-patterning yarn.

The woman seems to know about knitting, and she’s pulling on the start of the sweater, which also has delicate little eyelets. “Wow, these eyelets are great! What a great design!” she says. She starts pulling out little thread fragments from my work, which leads me to believe that perhaps what I’m knitting is intarsia. Except the threads she pulls out are themselves not all one color! I am trying really hard to figure out what is this thing I’m knitting, and my brain is blanking. “Do you have other designs?” she asks. “Yes, I do.” She says, “Well, I’m the editor of Vogue Knitting, and I’d love to see what else you’ve designed.” I’m shocked to realize who she is, and I’m totally blanking on her name, although her face now looks a whole lot more familiar. “Uhm, sure, let me tell you about the different things.” We start walking and talking, except she’s a frantic walker, and we’re sort of running around in a jerky fashion.

We walk right past the Interweave Knits office. I know exactly what it is, and so does she. It has balls and hanks of yarn on the windowsill, lots of them. “Don’t bother with those folks,” she tells me. We get to her office and I say, “Let me take out my digital camera, I have photos of some of my designs on the memory card.” I pull out my camera, except it’s not my camera, it’s someone else’s camera! I put it on the small coffee table in front of us, and that coffee table has like 5 cameras on it! An older couple comes running in, outfitted in RedSox gear, and claims one of the cameras. They are relieved to have found it. I finally fish out my own camera from my bag.

I have 1,113 (Purly? Colleen?) pictures on my camera, and I start shuffling through them, looking for specific ones. There are all kinds of irrelevant pictures on there – pictures of people, pictures of plants – I can’t seem to locate any knitting pictures! There are pictures of sweaters that I didn’t design, that I didn’t knit, and the editor sees them. I feel embarrassed to tell her that those aren’t actually my creations. Some of them are from Interweave, in fact. I start pulling stuff out of my bag, maybe looking for my camera again, and there are a few sketches. The editor grabs them and examines them, and she seems to like some of my ideas. The only problem is that they are highly digitized and processed, I must have been playing around in Photoshop to create surreal-like knitting collages for some reason. But she still digs it. There is one in particular of me and my grandma on massage tables; we are both wearing a Tivoli and receiving a massage (where? You use your imagination, the Tivolis are obviously covering our upper bodies). The editor loves it. “Oh,” I tell her, “I’ve got pictures of that design on my stupid camera. I just can’t find them because there are 1000 pictures on here.” I try looking through the camera again, but just can’t find any Tivoli pictures. The editor is getting antsy, and I know if I can’t show her the pics now, it will never happen again.

“Wait a minute,” I say, “if I have access to the internet, I can show you some pictures. I e-mailed some pictures to a friend, and they are saved in the ‘sent items’ folder. Do you have a computer?” “Sure, follow me,” she says in that frantic jerky way.

We walk to a big desk, and there’s a very small rectangular panel above it. On the left is an air conditioner unit, and on the right is something akin to a swinging kitty door. She goes first. She puts her hands through the kitty door, wiggles the rest of her upper body through the opening, and down and out she goes, like trash down a trash chute. I’m next. I put my arms through the hole, and my head is next. I look down, and it’s like a 1-story drop to the ground. “Wait, how am I supposed to get down?” I ask. She says, “I’ll catch you!” We both start laughing at the thought of my ass crushing this petite beautiful middle-aged woman. “Move out of the way, I’m going to give it a try on my own.” She does, no hesitation. I get myself through the kitty door, and the behind is a tight squeeze. I get it through, and my legs follow, and I don’t fall! I sort of grab the doorway and other architectural elements around me, and lower myself without a big thump. We’re on our way to her computer.

The end.

I woke up and my arms were so asleep! I had to wiggle my bottom to get out of bed, I couldn’t even use them. Maybe that’s why I was wiggling my bum in the dream to get through that little swinging door 🙂

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13 thoughts on “Just a glimpse into my mania”

I loved reading about your dream. I have been having recurring dreams that I had to fit through a very small trap door and slide down (or fall, or even risk getting stuck) from a very high place lately – very similar. Wonder what’s up with that. However I wasn’t knitting in those dreams, but I definitely find myself knitting all night sometimes! I love your blog and can’t wait to get started on a Tivoli – soon I hope – as soon as I finish about 10 pairs of socks for my boys.

I’ll bet there are a lot of symbols in your dream. A dream interpreter (if there is such a thing) could probably tell you alot about yourself by interpreting this dream. Some aspects are so strange (in a good way) that they must symbolize something else.

In a much more detailed way, it sounds like a variation on the good ol’ overachiever’s dream…you have to take an exam for a class you never attended or can’t find the classroom, etc. Only in your case you can’t find the pictures of your knitting.

You dream in color, don’t you? I read somewhere that most people dream in black/white and only very imaginative people dream in color.

Such a vivid dreamer you are! I have the same problem–and it gets to the point where I don’t feel as though I’ve rested at all because I’ve been dreaming so intensely. My favorite line from your post today: “it’s sitting on a honkin’ US 5 or 6 needle”…I don’t think I’d ever seen the adjective “honkin'” used for needle sizes Such a vivid dreamer you are! I have the same problem–and it gets to the point where I don’t feel as though I’ve rested at all because I’ve been dreaming so intensely. My favorite line from your post today: “it’s sitting on a honkin’ US 5 or 6 needle”…I don’t think I’d ever seen the adjective “honkin'” used for needle sizes < US11. Quite funny.